I received the attached essay by Robert Kennedy on another list serve. I
thought I would share it.

Wally Taylor


Published in the Winter 2005 issue of _EarthLight_
(http://www.earthlight.org/)
For the Sake of Our Children
by Robert F.  Kennedy, Jr.

_http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0223-25.htm

_ (http://www.commondreams.org/views05/0223-25.htm) I have been an
environmental advocate for twenty years, and I've been  disciplined during that period
about being nonpartisan in my approach to this  issue. The worst thing that can
happen to the environment is if it becomes the  province of a single
political party.

Most of the environmental leaders  in our country agree with me. Five years
ago, if you asked the leaders of the  major environmental groups in America,
What's the gravest threat to the global  environment?, they would have given you
a range of answers: overpopulation,  habitat destruction, global warming.
Today, they will all tell you one thing:  it's George W. Bush. This is the worst
environmental president that we have ever  had. You simply cannot speak
honestly about the environment in any context today  without speaking critically
about this president. If you go to the Natural  Resources Defense Council's web
site you will see over 400 major environmental  rollbacks that have been
promoted by this administration over the last three and  half years. It is a
concerted, deliberate attempt to eviscerate thirty years of  environmental law. It is
a stealth attack, one that's been hidden from the  public.

We found, in 2003, a memo from Frank Luntz, the president's  pollster, to the
president saying that if you go through with the evisceration  of America's
environmental law, you are going to alienate not just Democrats but  the
Republican rank and file. Eighty-one percent in both parties want clean air,  they
want stronger environmental laws and they want them strictly enforced.  Luntz
said that to the president, and he said, if we do this we have to do a  stealth
attack. He recommended using Orwellian rhetoric to mask this radical  agenda:
They want to destroy the forest, they call it the Healthy Forest Act,  they
want to destroy the air they call it the Clear Skies Act.

Most  insidiously, they have installed the worst, most irresponsible
polluters in  America, and the lobbyists from those companies, as the heads of
virtually all  the agencies and sub-secretariats and even Cabinet positions that
regulate or  oversee our environment. The head of the Forest Service is a timber
industry  lobbyist who is probably the most rapacious timber industry lobbyist
in American  history. The head of public lands is a mining industry lobbyist
who believes  that public lands are unconstitutional. The head of the Air
Division at the EPA  is a utility lobbyist who has represented the worst polluters
in America for  twenty years. The head of Superfund is a woman whose former
job was advising  companies how to evade Superfund. The second in command of EPA
is a Monsanto  lobbyist - these are not exceptions, these are the rules
across the agencies. I  think it's a good idea to bring business people into
government, to bring that  experience and expertise.

These individuals did not enter government  service for the purpose of
promoting the public interest, but in each of these  cases, rather to subvert the
very laws that they are now charged with enforcing.  We are seeing the impacts
of this already. This year, for the first year on  record, the EPA announced
that the dead zone in Lake Erie - you remember Lake  Erie was declared dead
prior to Earth Day 1970 - is growing. Our water in this  country, according to
EPA, is getting dirty for the first time since the Clean  Water Act was passed.

The rollbacks from the Bush administration have  affected the lives of
millions and millions of Americans adversely. Consider  just one industry: the
coal-burning utilities. One out of every four black  children in New York now has
asthma. I have three sons who have asthma. We don't  know why we have this
epidemic of pediatric asthma, but we do know that asthma  attacks are caused
primarily by two components of air pollution: ozone and  particulates. In the Los
Angeles Times recently there was a description of a  study that's about to be
published in the New England Journal of Medicine that  shows that even small
amounts of ozone pollution do permanent damage to  children's lungs. In San
Bernardino, for example, ten percent of the children  have lungs that are
permanently damaged, that will never recover; and that lung  injury precipitates in
human beings a whole host of other diseases throughout  their lifetime.

We know that the principal source of ozone and  particulates in our air is
coming from 1,100 coal-burning power plants that are  burning coal illegally.
They were supposed to install controls over fifteen  years ago. The Clinton
administration was prosecuting 75 of the worst of those  plants. But this industry
gave $48 million to President Bush during the 2000  campaign, and they've
contributed $58 million since. One of the first things  that President Bush did
when he came to office was to order the Justice  Department to drop all 75 of
those suits. The Justice Department lawyers were  shocked. This has never
happened in our history before, where somebody running  as a presidential candidate
accepts money from a criminal and then lets that  criminal off the hook.

Many of you remember what happened when President  Clinton pardoned Mark Rich
and how indignant the press and the public was at  that action. But Mark Rich
was one person, and he never killed anybody.  According to EPA, these 75
plants, just the criminal exceedences from these  plants, kill 5,500 Americans
every year. After letting these criminals off the  hook, the president then went
and rewrote the Clean Air Act, illegally we  believe. We're suing him, we'll
win the suit, but it may take ten years, and in  the meantime they'll discharge
what they want.

I live in New York State.  Most of the fish in New York are now unsafe to eat
from mercury contamination. I  live two miles from the state of Connecticut;
in Connecticut every freshwater  fish is now unsafe to eat. Last week, the
Fish and Wildlife Service announced  that in 19 states it is unsafe to regularly
eat any freshwater fish, and in 48  states at least some fish are unsafe to
eat. The mercury is coming, largely,  from those same 1,100 coal-burning power
plants. We know a lot about mercury  that we didn't know five or ten years ago.
We know that one out of every six  American women of childbearing years now
has so much mercury in her womb that  her children are at risk for a grim
inventory of diseases: cognitive impairment;  mental retardation; autism;
blindness; kidney, liver or heart disease. I have so  much mercury in my body, I was
told by Dr. David Carpenter, who is the national  authority on mercury
contamination, that if I were a woman of childbearing years  and produced a child, that
the child would have cognitive impairment, and, he  estimated, a permanent IQ
loss of five to seven points. There are 630,000  children born in this
country every year who have been exposed to dangerous  levels of mercury in the
womb.

Recognizing this threat to the American  public, the Clinton administration
reclassified mercury as a hazardous pollutant  under the Clean Air Act; that
triggered the requirement that those companies  remove 90 percent of that
mercury within three and a half years. It would have  cost, according to EPA, less
than one percent of the revenues of those plants  for them to do that. That's a
great deal for the American people, but it's still  billions of dollars for
that industry. Eight weeks ago, Bush announced that he  was scrapping the
Clinton-era rules and substituting, instead, rules that were  written by the
industry's lobbying firm Latham and Watkins. On their face, they  say that they have
to clean up, within fifteen years, 50 percent of the mercury.  But they've
woven so many loopholes into the new rule that they will literally  never have
to clean up. The chief lobbyist for the firm who wrote it is now the  head of
the Air Division at EPA.

We are living today in a science  fiction nightmare, a world where, because
somebody gave money to a politician,  our children are brought into a world
where the air is too poisonous for them to  breathe. This is a world where,
because somebody gave money to a politician, my  children and the children of
millions of other Americans can no longer enjoy the  seminal, primal activities of
their youth - which is to go fishing with their  father or mother and come
home and eat the fish. I live two hours south of the  Adirondack Mountains. This
is the oldest protected wilderness area on the face  of the Earth; it's been
protected since the 1880s. Today, one-fifth of the lakes  in the Adirondacks
are sterilized from acid rain which is coming from those same  coal-burning
power plants, and this president has put the brakes on the  statutory requirement
that those companies remove the materials that are causing  the acid rain.

I flew recently over the coalfields of the Appalachians.  I saw something
that if the American people could see there would be a  revolution in this
country. We are cutting down the mountains, literally cutting  them down. The coal
companies blow off the tops of the mountains, using 2,500  tons of dynamite in
West Virginia alone every year. They fire the workers: When  my father was
fighting strip mining in West Virginia in 1968 there were 114,000  coal miners
digging coal out of West Virginia. He told me that strip mining was  not only
going to destroy the economy of West Virginia in the long term but it  was
designed to destroy the jobs so that they didn't have to employ union labor.  Now,
there are only 12,000 miners left to get the same amount of coal. They do  it
by blowing off the tops of the mountains, and they take that rubble and they
dump it into the adjacent river valley. They've already covered up 1,200 miles
 of our streams.

We are destroying, flattening this landscape that is a  part of American
history. It's the source of our values, our virtues, our  character as a people;
the landscapes, the mountains where Davy Crockett and  Daniel Boone roamed, and
we are cutting them to the ground. Of course it's  illegal, you cannot take
rubble and debris and toxic waste and dump it into a  river without a Clean
Water Act permit, and the Clean Water Act could never let  you get a permit to do
that. So we sued. Joe Lovett, the attorney from West  Virginia, sued the Bush
administration and the Army Corps of Engineers for  allowing this practice to
happen. We won the lawsuit, and the judge enjoined all  mountain top mining.
Two days from that victory, the Bush administration rewrote  the Clean Water
Act to allow mountain top mining to continue forever; not only  that, but
changed the structure of the act so that anybody can dump rubble and  debris simply
by getting a rubber stamp permit from the Corps of Engineers.

If you ask the people in the White House who are promoting this  legislation,
Why are you doing this?, what they'll say is: We have to choose  between
economic prosperity and environmental protection - that is a false  choice. In 100
percent of the situations, good environmental policy is identical  to good
economic policy. We want to measure our economy based upon how it  produces jobs
and how it preserves the value of the assets of our community. If,  on the
other hand, we want to do what the Bush administration has been urging us  to
do, which is to treat the planet as if it were a business in liquidation, to
convert our natural resources to cash as quickly as possible, to have a few
years of pollution-based prosperity, we can generate an instantaneous cash flow
and the illusion of a prosperous economy. But our children are going to pay
for  our joy ride. They are going to pay for it with denuded landscapes and poor
 health and huge cleanup costs that are going to amplify over time and that
they  are never going to be able to pay. Environmental injury is deficit
spending.  It's a way of loading the costs of our generation's prosperity onto the
backs of  our children.

There is no stronger advocate for free-market capitalism  than myself. The
free market spawns efficiency, and efficiency means the  elimination of waste.
Waste is pollution, so in a true free-market economy you  would eliminate, as
nearly as you can, pollution. In a true free-market economy  you can't make
yourself rich without making your neighbors rich and without  enriching your
community. Polluters make themselves rich by making everybody  else poor. They
raise standards of living for themselves by lowering the quality  of life for
everybody else, and they do that by escaping the discipline of the  free market
and forcing the public to pay their production cost. You show me a  polluter,
I'll show you a subsidy. Corporations are externalizing machines; they  are
constantly trying to figure out a way to avoid their own costs and foist it  out
on the public.

I'll give you an example. When the coal companies,  the utilities, discharge
mercury into the air they are avoiding one of the costs  of bringing their
products to market, which is the cost of properly disposing of  a dangerous
processed chemical. When they avoid the costs they can out-compete  their
competitors, they can out-compete gas and oil and wind power. But the  costs don't
disappear. They go into the fish, they make children sick, they  permanently
injure children's lungs, they put people out of work, they acidify  the lakes in
the Adirondacks and they've destroyed the forest cover of the  Appalachian
Mountains all the way from Georgia up into Quebec. Those impacts  impose costs on
the rest of us that should be reflected in the price of that  product. All of
the federal environmental laws are meant to restore free-market  capitalism in
America. I don't even consider myself an environmentalist anymore.  I'm a free
marketeer. I go out into the marketplace, I track down the polluters  and I
say to them, We are going to force you to internalize your costs the same  way
that you're internalizing your profits. Americans have to understand that
there is a huge difference between free-market capitalism which democratizes our
country, that brings us prosperity and efficiency, and the kind of corporate
crony capitalism which is as antithetical to democracy in America as it is in
 Nigeria.

I work a lot with farmers trying to fight industrial hog meat  production,
which is not only one of the primary threats to the American  environment but
also one of the primary threats to the American worker. It's  allowing a few
monopolies to control our food supply and to put farmers out of  business.
Fifteen years ago there were 27,000 independent hog farmers in North  Carolina,
today there are none. They have been replaced completely by 2,200 hog  factories,
1,600 owned or controlled by Smithfield Foods, one large corporation.  They
produce such huge amounts of waste they have to dispose of it illegally,  and so
they have to corrupt political officials in order to continue operating.

I gave a speech a group of 1,200 farmers in Clear Lake, Iowa, and I said
that I am more frightened of these large multinationals than I am of Osama bin
Laden. I got a standing ovation from all the farmers in the room, but I got six
 months of abuse from the farm bureau. I stand by what I said. It's the same
thing that Teddy Roosevelt said, that our country was too strong and too
committed to ever be destroyed by a foreign enemy, but our democratic
institutions would be subverted by what he called "malefactors of great wealth,"  who
would destroy them from within. Another great Republican, Abraham Lincoln,
during the heat of the Civil War in 1863, said, I have the South in front of me,
and the bankers behind me and for my country, I fear the bankers more.

From the beginning of American history our greatest political leaders -
Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, John Adams and Andrew Jackson - have warned
America against allowing large corporations to dominate our political systems
and our lives. Another Republican, Dwight Eisenhower, the most famous speech
he  made was warning America against the domination by the military-industrial
 complex. Franklin Roosevelt said that the domination of our nation by large
corporations is the definition of fascism. I have an American Heritage
Dictionary, and the definition, if you look up fascism, says, "the domination of
government by large corporations driven by right-wing ideology and bellicose
nationalism" - that's getting to look pretty familiar. The problem with letting
 large corporations dominate our government is that it erodes democracy, it
erodes our capacity to participate in public life, our capacity for dignity,
and  it allows these entities to squander resources that belong to our
children.

But the thing that we've squandered worst of all is our natural  heritage:
the air that we breathe, the water that we drink, the wildlife, the  lands - all
these things that make us proud to be American. This administration  has
taken the conserve out of conservatism. They claim to like the free market,  but
what they are really embracing is corporate welfare capitalism, socialism  for
the rich. They claim to love property rights, but only when it's the right  of
a polluter to use his property to destroy his neighbor's property or to
destroy the public property. They claim to like law and order, but they are the
first ones to let the large corporations and their corporate contributors
violate the law at public expense. They claim to love local control and states'
rights, but it's only in those instances when they're taking down the barriers
to large corporations.

They claim to embrace Christianity while  violating the manifold mandates of
Christianity: that we are stewards of the  land, and that we are meant to care
for nature. They have embraced this  Christian heresy of dominion theology,
which James Watt was the first to  enunciate when he told the Senate, I don't
think that there is any point in  protecting the public lands because we don't
how long the world is going to last  before the Lord returns. The woman he
mentored for twenty years, Gale Norton, is  running the Department of the
Interior.

The reason that we protect  nature is because it enriches us. It enriches us
economically, yes, the base of  our economy, and we ignore that at our peril.
But it also enriches us  aesthetically and recreationally, culturally and
historically, and spiritually.  Human beings have other appetites besides money,
and if we don't feed them we're  not going to become the kind of beings that
our Creator intended. When we  destroy nature we impoverish ourselves, we
diminish ourselves and we impoverish  our children. We're not protecting those
ancient forests in the Pacific  Northwest, as Rush Limbaugh loves to say, for the
sake of a spotted owl. We are  protecting those forests because we believe that
the trees have more value to  humanity standing than they would have if we
cut them down.

I'm not  fighting for the Hudson for the sake of the shad or the sturgeon or
the stripped  bass but because I believe my life will be richer; my children,
my community  will be richer if we live in a world where there are shad and
sturgeon and  striped bass in the Hudson. Commercial fishing on the Hudson is
350 years old.  Many of these people come from Dutch families that learned the
same fishing  methods that they're using today from the Algonquin Indians
during the Dutch  colonial period. I want my children to be able to touch them when
they come to  shore to repair their nets or wait out the tides, and in doing
that, connect  themselves to New York history and understand that they are
part of something  larger than themselves. I don't want my children to grow up in
a world where  it's all Unilever and 400-ton factory trolleys 100 miles
offshore strip mining  the ocean with no interface with humanity, and where we have
no family farmers  left in America; where we've driven the final nail into
the coffin of Thomas  Jefferson's vision of an American democracy rooted in tens
of thousands of  freeholds owned by family farmers, each with a stake in our
democracy. I don't  want a world where we've lost touch with the seasons and
the tides and the  things that connect us to the ten thousand generations of
human beings that were  here before there were laptops, and that connect us
ultimately to God.

I  don't believe that nature is God or that we ought to be worshiping it as
God,  but I do believe that it's the way that God talks to us most clearly. God
talks  to human beings through many vectors: through each other, through
organized  religion, through the great books of those religions, through wise
people,  through art, literature, music and poetry - but nowhere with such
clarity,  texture, grace and joy as through Creation. We don't know Michelangelo by
looking at his biography, we know him by looking at the ceiling of the Sistine
 Chapel. We know our Creator best by studying Creation, which all of the
religious texts mandate us to do. If you look at all of the great, central
epiphany in every religious tradition in mankind's history, the revelation  always
occurs in the wilderness. Buddha had to go into the wilderness to  experience
self-realization. Mohammed had to go to the wilderness of Mount Hira  in 629
and wrestle an angel in the middle of the night to have the Koran  squeezed out
of him. Moses had to go onto the wilderness of Mount Sinai to get  the
Commandments. The Jews had to spend 40 years in the wilderness to purge  themselves
of the 400 years of slavery in Egypt.

Christ had to spend 40  days in the wilderness to discover his divinity. His
mentor was John the  Baptist, a man of the wilderness who lived in a cave in
the Jordan Valley and  dressed in the skins of wild animals. All of Christ's
parables are taken from  nature: I am the vine; you are the branch; The Mustard
Seed; the little swallows  the scattering, the seeds on fallow ground. He
called himself a fisherman, a  farmer, a vineyard keeper, a shepherd. That's how
he stayed in touch with the  people. He was saying things to them that
contradicted everything that they had  heard from the literate, sophisticated people
of their time. They would have  dismissed him as a quack but they were able to
confirm the wisdom of his  parables about the fishes and the birds through
their own observations of the  natural world. They were able to say: He's not
telling us something new, he's  simply illuminating something that's very, very
old.

When we destroy  these things, we're cutting ourselves off from the very
things that make us  human, that give us a spiritual life. And for these people on
Capitol Hill to be  saying that they are following the mandate of Christ by
liquidating our public  assets, what they are really doing is a moral affront
to the next generation.  That's why we preserve nature. Not for our sake, but
for the sake of the future.  That obligation is expressed by the term
sustainability. All that word means is  that God wants us to use the things we've been
given, to enrich ourselves, to  improve our quality of life, to serve others -
but we can't use them up. We  can't sell the farm piece by piece in order to
pay for the groceries; we can't  drain the pond to catch the fish. We can't
cut down the mountain to get at the  coal. We can live off the interest; we
can't go into the capital that belongs to  our children.

What you can do: To track the Bush record on the  environment, go to
_www.nrdc.org/bushrecord_ (http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord)  at the website  for the
Natural Resources Defense Council, where you will also find alerts,  updates on
victories, and opportunities for action.



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